Parashat Ki Teitzei – 5783
I recently visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and managed to have timed my visit to be able to view the exhibit “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina”. It was beautiful, and it was painful. Beautiful, because the pottery was subtly exquisite. Painful, because each piece was made by an enslaved human being, subjected to horrors we cannot begin to imagine. In the South in the mid-1800s, the phrase “buy local” had a whole different connotation. “Buy local” meant support the slave industry with your economic decisions. Don’t buy from the North – goods made by free people. The paradoxical mix of beauty and pain found in the Old Edgefield pottery is not so uncommon. We find it frequently in the Torah. The beauty is in the fact that the words are part of our ancient and sacred tradition. The pain is in what those words say.
